I had such fun. Though I’m never, ever, livecoding half an unwritten talk in an Emacs window again.

Today is Alan Turing’s 100th birthday. I’ve been thinking about him lately, in particular about a story that demonstrates the perils of working with genius.

Two bulls were grazing at the bottom of the big pasture, when the farmer let a load of heifers in at the top gate.

http://soundcloud.com/pdcawley/pretty-saro

I sometimes think that I should have published the lyrics to Child of the Library with a bibliography. The references in the second verse are all obvious to me, but I’m a white middle class English boy who grew up around boats. My childhood reading and yours may not intersect all that much.

Or… what I did this summer.

Here’s a revised version of A Child of the Library.

http://soundcloud.com/pdcawley/lands-end/s-0xYEc

So, on Saturday, the opening line, and pretty much the entire tune, of a song banged on my head as we went to our local Library to fill our boots with books and generally get with the “Save our Libraries” message. Here it is. Sing it out. Sing it loud.

Open Ears, Open Mind, Open Mouth. Music Making Made Easy

Blurb

Our bodies are the most versatile and sophisticated musical instrument we know. From the complexities of making at beat with our hands and feet to the surprising simplicity of harmony singing, we are all of us musicians.

http://soundcloud.com/pdcawley/lottery-song

I’m working on a web service, and that means that I need to build lots and lots of mildly different looking HTTP requests with various combinations of headers and requested URLs. The camel’s back got broken this morning when I realised I didn’t want to be writing a method called ssl_request_from_uk_with_bad_cert, which builds me an HTTP::Request with a particular combination of headers, that I can use with Plack::Test to test our webservice. The method name describes what’s wanted, but the code is sopping wet and in desperate need of DRYing up.

In Higher Order Javascript, I introduced Streams and showed how to use them to implement a lazy sort. I think that's neat all by itself, but it's not directly useful in the asynchronous, event driven execution environment that is the average web page. We'd like a structure where we spend less time twiddling our thumbs as we wait for force to return something to us.

To my surprise, several people have asked for the slides from my Øredev talk on Higher Order Javascript, and I’ve followed my usual practice of saying “Sorry, no”. Slide decks are a terrible teaching medium - they’re fine if they come with the presenter, but if they contain enough information to read as if they were a book, then I’m prepared to bet that they made a terrible presentation. Good presentations have a synergy; slides illustrate what the speaker is saying and neither the speech nor the slides should really stand alone. After all, if either could, why bother with the other?

Crikey! What an intense few days.

Last Friday, I got some email from Giles Bowkett saying that he’d had to flake on a conference in Sweden and could I take his place. The brief was to “be interesting, and I know you can nail that in your sleep”.

Last Saturday, I read it. And being flattered by Giles’s silver tongue answered to say “Probably, when is it?”.